


seven on a scale from dead to breathing

by procrastinatingbookworm



Series: Hello, I'm good for nothing - will you love me just the same? [2]
Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: ALL the issues, Amateur Medical Care, Coping, Depression, Emotional Baggage, Gen, Healing, Mental Health Issues, Mentions of memory loss, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Relationship, Promises, Serious Injuries, Suicidal Thoughts, Worldbuilding, all aboard the tiso's not an idiot train, all of them - Freeform, but he's not an idiot. he knows what he's doing., he also knows what quirrel is doing and he doesn't like it, he's (over) confident and kind of a douche, mentions/allusions to actions that probably qualify as a suicide attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:20:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26845786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procrastinatingbookworm/pseuds/procrastinatingbookworm
Summary: On the shores of Blue Lake, Quirrel and Tiso come to an agreement.
Relationships: Quirrel & Tiso (Hollow Knight)
Series: Hello, I'm good for nothing - will you love me just the same? [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1957039
Comments: 16
Kudos: 131





	1. I am an accident waiting to happen

Tiso wakes up to the sound of water.

Not rain, like in the city. Not the hiss of acid in the pools below the Colosseum. Just a gentle splashing—barely-there waves against a sandy shore. 

He opens his eyes, and sees what he expected—Blue Lake. The serenity of it still offends him. It’s too quiet, too still. Tiso can’t help but brace himself, waiting for some noise to break the quiet, to require him to draw up his shield and fight for his life.

It’s inevitable. Peace is just a lie weak bugs tell themselves to make sleep come easier.

Noise breaks into Tiso’s awareness sooner rather than later, of course—the very moment he shifts his weight, in fact—but for once it’s not the sound of something he needs to kill. It’s Quirrel, startling out of his reverie so violently that he drops his nail. It clatters onto Tiso’s shield, and the noise makes both of them flinch into tension-wrought silence.

After a moment of scanning his surroundings for danger, Tiso looks back at Quirrel.

Quirrel, with the sad look in his eyes and the nail polished to a shine. Quirrel, who leapt to treat Tiso’s wounds with nothing but the existence of a mutual acquaintance to even suggest that Tiso was worth the effort.

Quirrel, who looks absolutely  _ delighted _ to see Tiso glaring at him.

“You’re awake!” he declares, as if Tiso needs to be informed. “Are you in any pain?”

It occurs to Tiso that he probably  _ should _ be. He remembers quite a lot of pain. “No.”

Quirrel nods. “Between the hot spring and some local flora, you’ll probably be numb for a while yet.”

“Local flora?” Tiso asks, trying to sit up. “What did you smear on me?”

Quirrel grabs Tiso by the hood. Wyrm, he’s fast. Tiso barely even saw him move. “ _ Don’t _ put weight on your arm. And I didn’t  _ smear _ anything. It was a tonic.”

“I wasn’t going to!” Tiso snaps, which is a lie. He very deliberately braces his good hand against the blanket he’s been lying on. “Let go of me.” 

Quirrel lets go. Tiso’s arm buckles, and he sprawls back down.

At least Quirrel has the decency not to laugh.

“Why can’t I feel my arms?” Tiso asks, trying to keep his voice steady. He doesn’t quite succeed. “What did you do?”

“You’re smaller than you look,” Quirrel replies, and talks over Tiso’s immediate offended  _ hey _ . “I didn’t think to take your armor off. I gave you as much as I would have used for myself, and, well…” Quirrel gestures between the two of them.

“As much of what? What did you give me?” Tiso demands.

“Gulka venom,” Quirrel replies, like that’s a normal thing to force-feed someone. Tiso opens his mouth to snarl a reply, before Quirrel cuts him off again. “It worked, didn’t it?”

Tiso concedes the point with a nod. His memory of being dragged from the Colosseum and to the adjoining hot spring is fuzzy, but he certainly remembers the pain, and he isn’t eager for it to return.

Quirrel goes back to polishing his nail. 

Tiso examines himself—his armor is gone, but his hood is still on, tattered as it is. There are more bandages wrapped around him than fabric

“You knew how to tend me,” he notes. “Strange, a warrior who can heal more than himself.”

“Most of what I know comes from caring for myself,” Quirrel admits. “You don’t survive long as a wanderer without some expertise in impromptu medicine.”

“Can’t you just use SOUL?” Tiso asks.

Quirrel shrugs, looking back down at his nail.

“You either don’t have the capacity or you’re a coward,” Tiso declares, and to his annoyance, Quirrel doesn’t even look bothered.

“Both,” he says instead, tracing the cleaning cloth up a groove in his nail for no particular reason, given that the thing is already spotless. “My SOUL doesn’t hold much, and I do my best not to kill unless I need to.”

Tiso laughs. “No wonder your nail is so clean. You’d do better applying that cleaning cloth to your shell.”

Quirrel doesn’t answer, turning his head to stare out over the Blue Lake for long enough that Tiso starts to fidget.

“Come on, don’t be all sensitive. I’m not wrong.”

“You’re not wrong,” Quirrel answers. “I’m just trying to remember.”

“Remember what?” Tiso prods.

Quirrel looks at him, and Tiso can’t help but shudder. That sad look is back in his eyes, as ancient and tired as when they’d come to the mutual realization that they were in Hallownest for the same reason, more or less.

“What I was, before this.” He gestures with the shining nail. “Because I’m not a warrior. It’s just that there’s not much  _ else _ to be in Hallownest these days.”

Tiso nods. He thinks, carefully, about his options. He thinks of the Colosseum, its howling and its promises of pain and joy and terror. He thinks of acid bubbling, of the deceptive calmness of the Blue Lake.

He thinks of Quirrel, laughing—not at Tiso, but  _ with _ him, in commiseration.

“Well,” Tiso sighs, lying back on the blanket. “I suppose you have time to figure it out.”

That earns Tiso a slight twist of confusion in Quirrel’s expression, but the sadness doesn’t go away.

“Is that so?” Quirrel asks, cautiously, like he’s prodding an Ooma with that nail of his. 

“You seem rather intent on keeping me alive,” Tiso answers, as casual as can be. “More so than I am.”

Quirrel finally smiles—his eyes are still ancient, but not so sad any longer. “I suppose that…” he pauses. Looks at his nail, looks at the Lake. “I suppose that will suit us both.”

Tiso feels triumphant—a quiet triumph, next to the joy of victory in battle, but triumph all the same.


	2. Disguised as a hero to get past your borders

They don’t talk about it for a while, to Tiso’s relief.

It’s a hell of a pact to have made with a near-stranger, especially with their shared aversion to actually saying what they mean.

Tiso doesn’t like it. He doesn’t know why he proposed it—why he didn’t ignore his instinctive reaction to that exhausted, unhappy look on Quirrel’s face. 

He’s going to have a hard enough time keeping  _ himself _ alive, with his injuries as severe as they are, and his pride more dented than his shield, but having  _ another _ life in his hands is… terrifying.

Honestly, Tiso doesn’t even know why he cares. Quirrel might be enough of a bleeding heart to get attached to a friend’s acquaintance whose life he saved, but Tiso  _ isn’t _ .

He shouldn’t give a single half-dead wyrm if Quirrel wants to take a long walk off a short beach.

And yet even thinking about it makes Tiso feel sort of nauseous. It’s  _ frustrating. _ He’s not a grubsitter. He has too much to do.

That train of thought ultimately dead-ends in the re-realization that he doesn’t, actually, have anything to do. He’s a dead bug walking. 

Sure, he can eventually learn to use his shield with his other arm, but his off hand’s been all but useless his whole life.

If the way he can hardly sit up without a nearly inadvisable amount of Galka venom to take the edge off the pain is any evidence, it’ll be months before he recovers enough to drill the way he’ll need to if he wants to have a chance of surviving on his own.

Not even addressing the mess that’s his head.

Tiso might not have Quirrel’s apparently sourceless bursts of intellect, or the little squib’s path-smarts, but he’s not an idiot.

Hallownest was always going to be a final stop, one way or another. It’s like he told Quirrel: a weak bug is a dead bug. If Tiso can’t be strong, he may as well not  _ be  _ at all.

Tiso had hoped that he would at least die with dignity, and not like a pathetic grub.

He still hopes so. At least if he’d died in the Colosseum it would be a warrior’s death, not a surrender.

“You do not look like a happy bug,” Quirrel says, suddenly, from Tiso’s left.

Tiso doesn’t flinch as badly as Quirrel does when he’s startled, but it’s a near thing. He bolts upright, quickly enough that his vision briefly whites out with pain. “Wyrm, Q. Don’t sneak up on a bug. You’re lucky I’m down my shield arm.”

Quirrel’s smile goes tense at the corners, and Tiso’s struck once again—hard, in the chest—by the reason why he isn’t dragging himself back to the Colosseum. “I suppose I am, aren’t I.”

In a sudden burst of frustration, Tiso wonders why either of them are bothering to keep this up. It’s just a farce. Eventually, one of them will be too tired to care anymore, and the other will wake up alone, and that will be that. 

Curtains. 

The pale squib would notice. They’d noticed once already, quick enough to save the two of them, one after the other, but they would be the only one.

Quirrel is staring at the lake again, fidgeting with the uprooted Galka he’s holding. Tiso’s really starting to hate the lake, less for its serenity and more for the promises Quirrel reads from its depths.

“We should just relocate to Greenpath,” Tiso says, quietly enough that he won’t scare Quirrel. “So you don’t have to make the trek every time I start feeling my nerves again.”

“You should start weaning off it anyway,” Quirrel replies, low-voiced. “It’s never good to be too dependent on one thing.”

Tiso narrows his eyes. Quirrel widens his.

“Something you’re trying to tell me, Q?”

Quirrel smiles that sad, awful smile. “You don’t have to do this for me, you know. I don’t need repayment for my efforts. It’s enough to have done some good in this world.”

Tiso just stares at Quirrel for a moment. He gets his good arm—the one not strapped to his chest to keep him from using it—under him, pushes himself upright and then forward, onto one knee, then the other, then his feet, still in a shaky crouch..

Quirrel’s already stammering at him not to try and stand, but Tiso ignores him. He braces his hand against the ground and levers himself up, slowly and surely.

It surprises Tiso as much as it probably surprises Quirrel when he actually manages to stand—swaying dangerously, but still standing—much less stay there long enough to start talking.

“You self-centered, moss-brained  _ twit _ ,” Tiso declares. “You think I want to be here? You think I have anything better to do? I didn’t come to this rotted shell of a kingdom to sit by a stupid lake. I’m not staying so I can repay  _ anyone _ for  _ anything. _ ”

Quirrel looks like he might cry, or be sick. Tiso isn’t sure which would be worse.

“I’m staying here because we’re the same.”

Quirrel tugs his bandana down over his eyes.

“We’re a couple of broken warriors with no use and nowhere else to be. Whatever’s happening here, it’s not for you or me. It’s a cooperative effort.”

Tiso sways. He should probably wrap this up before he faints.

“Whether we’re going to die or not, we don’t have to do it alone.

Silence, except for the whispering of the lake.

Silence, for a long time.

Quirrel looks up, wet-eyed, and holds out a hand.

Tiso laces their fingers together.

It’s not a solution, but it’s a start.

**Author's Note:**

> Alternative summary:  
> "If you're suicidal... and I'm suicidal..."  
> "Who's flying the plane?"


End file.
